Review: Miss Julie

"You only have yourself to blame. It's dangerous to play with fire," Jean (Peter Mullan) warns Miss Julie (Saffron Burrows). But play on Miss Julie does. "I think you're all talk," she teases. "I think you haven't got it in you." He does but she allows him nothing further than a kiss. When she slaps off his further efforts, he pushes her off his lap and onto the ground. "Your play is too serious for me," he says. "I'm tired of play." Yet play on they do.

Their encircling of each other is no simple flirtation. Jean is footservant to a Count. Miss Julie is the Count's daughter, doomed to despair but looking to be saved by love. She pursues Jean, despite his station and his engagement to Christine (Maria Doyle Kennedy), the cook. Jean is incapable of love, as Miss Julie will soon discover, but he views her as a means to fulfill his dream - he wants to be more than a footservant. He relates a recurring dream - he is at the foot of a tree with a nest of golden eggs which he can't quite reach. He feels he can reach it with Miss Julie's help. Never mind her ruin.

"What on earth drew me to you?" she says disgustedly when she realizes she's been used. Yet she can't help it, she needs to believe he can save her. "Say you love me," she asks. "We've made fools of ourselves once. Let's not do it again," he responds. Yet their destructive dance continues.

I quite enjoyed Miss Julie, which is a less experimental but equally stylized film as his last work The Loss and Death of Sexual Innocence, upon which I looked kindly. Already a claustrophobic work, having originated as August Strindberg's controversial Swedish play, Figgis exploits the theatrical roots and wrings suspense out of the claustrophobia. Closeups dominate and within these shots, Figgis also catches the spaces of things. A frame, for example, may contain a cut of Mullan's face and perhaps one of Burrows' eyes. When Jean finally takes Miss Julie, the mood is one of subtle savagery and Figgis shows it in split screen. Both angles display the look of fear and bewilderment engraved on her face. When she sinks to the floor as he withdraws from her, it demonstrates that for all her strength and social standing, he can still subjugate her with sex.

Mullan, who impressed in My Name is Joe, flexes his emotional dexterity. Jean serves no one but himself and Mullan shows with remarkable economy how ambition can be a man's sole emotion. Burrows, that stalk of a beauty, is as astonishing. It's an unalloyed pleasure to simply watch her listen to Mullan with such involved intensity. Her face already suggests that Miss Julie is ravaged by something beyond her control; she looks sadly feral and oddly mad as if she were Ophelia somehow resurrected from her watery grave. She wanders about the house, constantly talking of escape, but the house is a prison and like her beloved bird she is encaged. She is ghosted and even the house, with its funhouse mirrors and smoky windows, distort her into unbeing.

Miss Julie

Directed by: Mike Figgis

Written by: Helen Cooper; adapted from August Strindberg's play

Starring: Saffron Burrows, Peter Mullan, Maria Doyle Kennedy